"Life on the Run," a micro-budget independent film about the urge to make art, is being shot in and around the Capital Region, including, most recently, on the streets of Glens Falls.

The film "kind of has a structure that's a cross between 'Downton Abbey' and 'Citizen Kane,'" said the director, Roger Wyatt, a retired academic and digital filmmaker based in Greenwich, Washington County.

Combining the former's intertwining, multigenerational stories and the latter's flashbacks, "Life on the Run" hinges on a pair of retirees sitting in a cafe (actually the Rock Hill Bakehouse on Exchange Street). One, Cosmo, is happy and artsy, toting around a sketchbook, flirting with the waitress. The other, Alan, is a miserable retired lawyer. "My shorthand for him is clueless," Wyatt said. "He is completely unprepared for retirement. Nobody returns his phone calls anymore, and he doesn't know what he's going to do."

The two strike up a conversation about art. Alan (played by Bill Sanderson) asks Cosmo (played by Keith Mueller) why he does it. "And Cosmo replies with stories that illustrate all the questions the guy is asking. So that's the flashback structure."

These flashbacks involve four characters (a writer, a musician, a painter, a singer) who interact at various life stages. Played by multiple actors, the characters sometimes encounter themselves at different ages. Wyatt described this as "magical reality; so the 19-year-old can have a conversation with the midlife version of himself. Like, 'What have you done to me?' That kind of thing."

Wyatt, retired from the School of Library and Information Management at Emporia State University in Kansas, co-owns BBH Digital Film Productions. His past work includes video productions of operatic works, among them "Puccini: Portrait of a Bohemian" and Mozart's early "Bastien et Bastienne."

"Life on the Run" started shooting in summer of 2011 and will likely continue into 2014, when Wyatt hopes to "self-distribute" it nationally. The budget so far: about $7,000. Loosely scripted with guided improvisation, the movie features such figures as WNYT co-anchor Benita Zahn, singer-songwriter Kevin McKrell and NPR's Robert Siegel — a friend of Wyatt's from the Columbia University class of 1968.

Most recently, cast and crew shot street scenes in Glens Falls in an alley near the police department headquarters on Ridge Street, with the GFPD's assistance.